A courageous Left-winger exposes the ruin of Britain
Ed West enjoys Nick Cohen's eloquent account of a 'second low, dishonest decade'
20 March 2009

Waiting for the Etonians
By Nick Cohen
4th Estate, £12.99

Something big happened in British politics in this last decade, a shift of a large but still unknown magnitude that may result in the end of the modern Left and a new world of strange alliances.

The European Left may have endured the absolute failure of Communism and the discrediting of socialism, but Islam, or at least Islamism, is ripping it in two. Since 9/11 liberals, social democrats and socialists of all shades have been at each other's throats.

As Nick Cohen wrote in December 2005 for the New Statesman: "Before you go to a Left-wing meeting, prepare yourself for the likelihood that everyone you meet will be standing on their heads. Do not be surprised to see Communists supporting fascists, feminists throwing their arms around misogynists and liberals apologising for tyranny." It has been like that, the author points out, "since 9/11 turned the world upside down".

Prior to 2002 Cohen was one of the foremost Left-wing journalists in Britain. The Manchester-born Observer and New Statesman columnist worked his way up via the Birmingham Post and the Independent, uncovering the murky deals between bankers and regulators, the explosion in management consultants and the inhumane manner in which asylum seekers are treated - all of them subjects covered in this volume, which spans the whole decade, a decade which Cohen has chronicled better than anyone.

Cohen's disillusionment with his comrades came about because of the anti-Iraq War movement, and especially the million-plus march in February 2003.

He asked why progressives like Tony Benn and George Galloway, who opposed exploitation and injustice at home, grovelled to Saddam Hussein and failed to question him about mass murder (or why anti-war Anglicans ignored Saddam's gassing of Assyrian Christians).

Why should people in the Arab world and elsewhere be denied the freedoms that westerners take for granted, he wondered. How could Left-wingers, feminists and gays support groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which murder gay men and keep women as slaves? How could liberals side with fascist death cults against America and Israel, flawed democracies but democracies nonetheless?

Why, as he addresses in an article called "It's The Jews, Once Again", have liberals embraced anti-Semitism? (Cohen has had some directed at him, although he is an atheist by upbringing, and is only a quarter Jewish by blood). Ken Livingstone invited to the capital some of the most violent anti-Semites in the Middle East and compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard. In last year's mayoral election Labour lost the Jewish vote for the first time since the War.

This split in the Left, with liberal imperialists (or the "pro-liberation left", as they call themselves) on one side and multiculturalists, socialists and anti-Americans on the other, became the subject of Cohen's last book, What's Left. Waiting for the Etonians covers aspects of that argument again; essay titles like "Tyranny and the Intellectuals" and "Oh, Comrades" suggesting a real falling-out with many former friends.

His enemies accuse him of becoming a Tory, of doing what many Left-wing journalists, like Melanie Philips or Peter Hitchens, have done and become conservatives. But Cohen would probably claim that he is more like Peter's brother Christopher, in that his views are still the same, it is the mainstream Left who have changed. They so obsessed with opposing America and traditional conservatism that they have embraced the far-right ideologues of Islam.

Cohen's other pet obsessions reflect his desire for justice and his contempt for the hypocrisy of the cosy. He writes scathingly about the fad for organic and "natural" products, and points out that in reality natural childhood is among the most dangerous things in the world. He loathes the hypocrisy of wealthy feminists who treat their Filipino maids like slaves, television producers who won't allow their own children to watch the rubbish they put out, and eco-warriors who rant about "Big Pharma" and "Frankenstein foods".

But the big theme of the book is the crunch. In the introductory essay, "Looking Back at the Ruins", he reflects on the lead-up to the Great Crash of 2008 and how Britain's total debts reached £1.35 trillion in August 2007, overtaking the entire gross domestic product of the country (that's nothing - it's now £2 trillion).

The bubble was built on the housing market, which meant that the average property went from £62,453 to £179,425 in 10 years, and by 2006 was six times the average wage, an unsustainable ratio that left large numbers of people dangerously in debt. Some banks, such as Northern Rock, were giving 125 per cent mortgages before reality brought them down.

With the Left in control of politics and the media - and racism, homophobia and sexism off-limits - the poor became the butt of the media's bullying, characterised as "grasping inhabitants of a parasite paradise, scrounging off the cozened middle class in television comedy". Cohen warns us, and the warning becomes more frightening every week, that any of us might join the ranks of the poor.

Meanwhile the gap between the middle class and the super-rich grew ever wider, so that once desirable areas of London became enclaves of oligarchs.

The mega-rich bought super-yachts for £8m or more, splashed out £20m on flats in Knightsbridge that included underground passageways to an exclusive restaurant, and spent £4m on children's parties.

It was, writes Cohen, "a second 'low, dishonest decade' , a time when the BBC was more likely to indulge supporters of oppression than Fox News; when you were more likely to find anti-Semitism by looking to the Left than the Right; and when the general secretary of Amnesty International was more likely to denigrate human rights as white, middle-class indulgences than the general secretary of the Communist Party of China".